Zadie Smith - "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays"

Zadie Smith’s essays will chiefly appeal to readers of serious fiction, aspiring authors, cinephiles, and Anglophiles. If you identify with any of these groupings, then you will find Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays engaging and probably worth your while.

Readers Of Serious Fiction

What prompted me to check this collection out of my local library was Smith’s essay w/r/t David Foster Wallace’s Interviews With Hideous Men, a collection of short stories that was living up to the recently deceased author’s reputation for being a difficult read. This is why I was happy to discover that Smith herself has wanted to throw Wallace’s books across the room. I’ve wanted to do the same. But yet, according to Smith, it’s in the rereading of Wallace’s works that the difficulty slips away and the stories (and his novels) become comprehensible and even enjoyable.

The concept of rereading was a favorite of Vladimir Nabokov and Smith’s usage of the concept in explaining Wallace indirectly points the reader to another essay collected here entitled – appropriately enough – ‘Rereading Barthes and Nabokov’. And that’s part of the pleasure of this collection: the way ideas and works and artists from other essays reappear and give Changing My Mind a nice cohesiveness. (I can use “nice” as an adjective here because Smith is British and in Britain “nice” is a far weightier adjective than it is in America.) You’ll find in the Wallace essay references to Kafka and Henry James that make you recall a previous essay that were either about them or considered their points of view when discussing other literary figures.

What comes through is that Smith herself takes fiction seriously: she doesn’t only mention the obvious, she’ll mention the obscure: to see Gregor von Rizzori and Thomas Bernhard – two favorites of mine - mentioned – albeit briefly - gladdened my heart. And because of this, the reader of serious fiction takes Smith seriously. Because of Changing My Mind, you’ll want to read or reread some of the authors she writes of. For me, that will be Zora Neal Hurston (read), Nabokov (reread), E. M. Forster (reread), and George Eliot(reread). I do agree with Smith’s opinion that Middlemarch is best read middle-age or later.

Aspiring Authors

With three novels to her credit, Smith has some opinions on the novel and advice for aspiring authors. Her lecture ‘That Crafty Feeling’ “given to students of Columbia University’s Writing Program” has some valuable insights, but ‘Middlemarch and Everybody’ was more instructive for how an author can incorporate a philosopher’s philosophy into their work and make it their own. Some will find ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ helpful in this regard too. I did not. It was one of the few essays here that felt flat to me. Originally a book review that considered what Smith saw as new directions in literature – if I can paraphrase copy that appeared on Miles Davis’ late 1960s LPs – but struck me as just being that old argument about modernism versus post-modernism . It didn’t make me want read either of the novels (Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder) that the book review was considering either.

Cinephiles

The Newsweek quote on the back of Changing My Mind says that Smith’s “… funny as hell.” Nowhere is this more evident than in her film reviews and essays: they’re easily the most fun to read. Smith loves movies and her joy is contagious when she writes about them. I share Smith’s admiration for Katherine Hepburn even if we disagree about what her best picture is. (According to Smith it’s The Philadelphia Story whereas I’d select The Lion In Winter.) Her essay on Hepburn is exceptional and her piece on Garbo goes a long way in explaining Garbo’s allure. But it’s the movie reviews in ‘At The Multiplex, 2006’ that will make you laugh out loud. Take this from her review of Shopgirl: “Steve Martin’s face. I can’t explain it. You have to see it. But whatever he has done to it, he does not look one day younger than he is.” That made me laugh out loud.

Anglophiles

You have to be a bit of an Anglophile or at least tolerate the British worldview to enjoy Smith’s essays because being British permeates her writings. She was born in northwest London and attended King’s College, Cambridge University and this partially explains why she finds a movie such as V For Vendetta enrapturing her and a novelist such as Forster still important.

Being the daughter of an English father and a Jamaican mother, racial and multi-racial issues are also a concern. She has foresightful piece here on Barack Obama’s election and the role race played and would play on his coming administration. She references Barack’s own writing while doing so and it made me interested in reading his books also.

Race is also why she leads this collection with ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean?’ As a teenager she reluctantly read Hurston’s most popular novel. She felt her mother gave it to her as a gift because it was by a black author. She agrees to read it but admits her “literary defenses were up ….” I won’t give away the ending except to say it has something to do with this collection’s title. And don’t be surprised if after reading Smith’s essays, you find yourself changing your mind on some things. At the very least you’ll find probably find yourself rereading.